Evidence from WC4 that Blair is a Pilgrim

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<FONT color=lightblue><B>I was going to say someth

Since it was off topic on the "Future of Wing Commander" thread, I decided to make a new thread for the response. This may have been discussed before, but I don't want to search several pages for it since my computer's slow and takes a long time to draw up pages. Also, maybe some people will bring up ideas that haven't been heard.

Fellentos said:

When did the whole "Pilgrim" story get introduced anyway? I haven't heard one single bit of it untill I saw the Wing Commander Movie. It made the movie so much worse imo.

I also didn't enjoy the whole "Pilgrim" story in the movie. I thought it was something that was totally made up for the movie until I was playing through WC4 two months ago. I was stunned when I heard a Confed pilot taunt me by calling me a Pilgrim. I'm not sure of any story of this from novels, but this occurance made it more understandable that Blair was a "Pilgrim" in the movie since he was called this in WC4.

Frog Blast the Vent Core!

The pilgrim taunt is only heard when you are fighting for the UBW...as you mention a confed pilot said it. The UBW is thought of in a kind of colonial sense by confed and a lot of americans can be thought to assiocate pilgrims with colonies...

The pilgrim story is only mentioned in the movie the and the fiction elements that are spin offs of the movie

Vice Admiral

<FONT color=lightblue><B>I was going to say someth

I think the Confed pilots recognize that they're challenging Blair, much as you can recognize Kilrathi, Confed, and Border Worlds pilot ID's from your targeting system. For this reason, it COULD be that Blair is a known "Pilgrim"- along the same lines as the WCM Pilgrims. There's no way to know for sure, but it just helps me deal with the movie more by thinking of that as the reason. If Chris Roberts allowed the movie to go forward with the "Pilgrim" part of the script, you'd think that he at least thought it wouldn't contradict the games. Granted, there's not much discussion about Pilgrims in the games, but WCM can be seen in the timeline as before the games, so maybe it was a much more hot topic that cooled off over the WC years. I wonder if the Pilgrim idea was tossed around long before the WCM with or by Chris Roberts? Anyone know of scrapped Pilgrim ideas from previous games and "canon"? (btw. thanks for the cannon pict. LOAF)

Rear Admiral

Vice Admiral

The whole Pilgrim idea looked like a cheap "We need something like the Force in Star Wars"-marketing thought to me. The Wing Commander universe in the games is so un-spiritual (at least the human side) that the whole thing about psychic powers and magic artifacts seems glued-on.

Long Live the Confederation!

Edit: as huge retroactive continuity messes go, the fact that Blair's parents had a weird religion is nothing. Think about Wing Commander IV -- suddenly we find out that the planets we've been defending for three games are really "Border Worlds", a previously unreference faction that we're now expected to empathize with?

Spaceman

Long Live the Confederation!

You're not making the stretch between the fact that he's a Pilgrim and they call him "Pilgrim"?

It's a clever reference. It *probably* wasn't intentional (though the movie script did exist at the time, it wasn't a serious project yet). It's akin to "Blair" showing up in Freedom Flight -- a happy accident.

Spaceman

As far as the UBW suddenly appearing in WC4, that doesn't seem like the same kind of stretch as inventing a new religion that's central to the plot line, because many of these worlds on the border were colonies, presumably in the same sense that the European powers in the 19th century had colonies. This had already been established in the previous games. The fact that an organization exists that coordinates their local defense doesn't seem that unusual, especially considering the size of the human-inhabited galaxy. WC IV simply gave them a name and an agenda.

Although I would be inclined to agree with the irrelevance of the Pilgrim religion in the grand scheme of things. If you're the Hero and Savior of the Confederation, I don't think it would matter what your parents believed, in or how ridiculously good you were at math (well, maybe a little).

Spaceman

No, I think that’s “the stretch”. It’s hard to imagine a Confed pilot using the term “Pilgrim” in a generic way. It carries quite a history after all, and a rather dread one at that. Plus it would be the “perfect” insult to toss at Blair, effectively calling him a traitor twice over.

Rear Admiral

I begin to doubt that the term Pilgrim used in WC4 was not use intentionly at Blair. If characters used certain phrases from certain people ie John Wayne, Elvis and other recgonisable faces, then I dont think that Blair was known as a Pilgrim.
Although I am still looking at the references and info I got at the moment

Crazy Nazi Kitten Impaler<BR><IMG SRC="images/rank

IIRC, in the books, the Kilrathi used taunts like, "Bugs Bunny screws his mother", because they had intercepted old broadcasts of looney toons, thought that Bugs Bunny was some kind of revered figure, and decided that insulting him would engrage the hairless apes. Confed pilots thought it was hillarious, so it's reasonable to assume that other icons in entertainment history would be remembered, and there would always be guys trying to impersonate them.

Although, if the script for the movie was already in existance, I guess it wouldn't take a huge stretch (just a medium sized stretch) of the imagination to assume that some confed pilots knew of Blair's unrevealed history, though you'd have to wonder how they'd find out about it.

What is kinda surprising is that you didn't occasionaly run up against a pilot that would not really taunt you, but say stuff like, "I'm sorry to have to kill you" or something like that.